ARTS AND CULTURE

Alfred Uhry

Playwright

Atlanta-born Alfred Uhry is one of the most storied playwrights and screenwriters in the US today, having won an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. The author of the "Atlanta" trilogy of plays, which includes 1987's "Driving Miss Daisy," Uhry's latest stage offering, a revival of his 1998 musical "Parade," tells the story of Leo Frank, an American Jew falsely convicted of rape by a court in Georgia in 1913 who was then brutally lynched two years later. In an interview earlier this year, Uhry explained that he had a personal connection to the story through Frank's wife. "I was always fascinated by the story, in part because my grandmother personally knew Lucille Frank," he recalled. Frank's story is "set to what was then an astonishing score by a 20-something newcomer and which, 25 years later, comes across as not only astonishing but pretty much perfectly wrought," the New York Stage Review wrote of the musical's current outing. (Photo: Wikimedia / Creative Commons License)